tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-219998052018-03-19T15:12:48.469-05:00Anecdotal EvidenceA blog about the intersection of books and life.Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.comBlogger4698125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-68171083338045366752018-03-19T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-19T00:00:03.694-05:00`We Know the Topography of Its Blots'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">A magician I knew who specialized in parties for children once listed for me the words guaranteed to get a laugh out of preschoolers. Most will not come as news to parents. My friend didn’t “work blue,” as comedians used to say, so the list is G-rated. The ones I remember are </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">monkey</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">underwear</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">potty, butt</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> and </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">banana</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">. The last one surprised me, as it had surprised the magician at first. Something about the sound of the word and the shape of its referent, he learned from experience, cracked up kids. So much so that he added a toggle switch to a plastic banana and worked it into his act. For the adults in the room he added the obligatory </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64mb_hUOb4g" style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Donovan</a><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> allusion.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">My younger sons and I were riffing on bananas the other day after seeing a cartoon involving the banana-peel-on-the-sidewalk gag. This in turn reminded me of the “Banana Breakfast” scene early in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gravity’s Rainbow</i>. “Pirate” Prentice grows bananas in his rooftop hothouse in London and prepares a sumptuous morning meal:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“. . . banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre </i>. . . tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead... banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter . . .”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And so on. I found my copy of the novel and read the passage aloud. It’s typical Pynchon silliness and earned a few laughs from my sons, though I had to explain <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kreplach</i>. I hadn’t opened the book in years and last read it in 1973, when I reviewed it for an “underground” magazine published in Bowling Green, Ohio. It’s a first-edition paperback (“A Viking Compass Book”), stained and creased but still readable. I remember buying it in a mall bookstore in Youngstown, Ohio. I wrote my name and the date on the front endpaper: March 21, 1973 [on that date, <a href="https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/trial/exhibit_12.pdf">John Dean uttered</a> the memorable phrase "a cancer on the presidency"]. That same page and the front cover are stained with what appears to be coffee. The cover price is $4.95. On Page 4 my younger self (I was twenty) underlined this sentence: “There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet.” I have no desire to reread <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gravity’s Rainbow</i> but the book is familiar in my hands, and most of the annotations and underlinings make sense. I remember what Charles Lamb wrote on <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3h8zAAAAYAAJ&amp;pg=PA187&amp;lpg=PA187&amp;dq=charles+lamb+letter+Oct.+11+1802+your+offer+about+the+german+poems&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=mVhuYueViA&amp;sig=aSI5mFifN0v4Cf_F9y16WAl-xcQ&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwio4qi7yvbZAhWO7FMKHS94BFEQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&amp;q=charles%20lamb%20letter%20Oct.%2011%201802%20your%20offer%20about%20the%20german%20poems&amp;f=false">Oct. 11, 1802</a> to Coleridge:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“. . . a book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-53940185765627840272018-03-18T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-18T00:00:12.825-05:00`Art Keeps Long Hours'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">While reading Donald Justice again I was reminded of his fondness for Charles Burchfield, one of my favorite American painters and, like me, a native of Northeastern Ohio. Even at their most stylized, I recognize his landscapes and city scenes. Justice opens </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">New and Selected Poems</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> (1995) with “On a Picture by Burchfield”:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">"Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Already your agony has outlasted ours."<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In Burchfield’s paintings everything is alive and writhing. Even Ohio winters writhe with spring latency. Some artists see desolation and sterility wherever they look. For Burchfield, even dead landscapes are charged with life. Objects in his paintings – trees, flowers, houses, seldom people -- are sacred because they live. “Pantheism” pushes the idea too far. Burchfield celebrates creation.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">For fifty-six years he kept an almost daily journal. Written in pencil, ink and crayon, it amounted to 10,000 manuscript pages and more than 2 million words. J. Benjamin Townsend spent 15 years editing the sprawling journal housed at the <a href="https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/charles-e-burchfield/">Burchfield Penney Art Center </a>in Buffalo since the artist’s death in 1967. In 1993, the State University of New York published the result: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place</i>, Townsend’s 737-page selection, arranged chronologically within thematic categories. The Burchfield Penney Art Center now posts daily excerpts from the journal at a site they call <a href="https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/general/ceb-in-his-own-wo">“Charles E. Burchfield in his own words.”</a>Here is Burchfield writing on March 12, 1922: “I would like to be the embodiment of March — both in life &amp; art—.” And this, in the Keatsian mode, from Jan. 11, 1914:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The analytical mind kills poetry. The rainbow was a supernatural event until someone ex­plained it that falling rain broke up the sunlight into colors. Yet it is ignorance not to know it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Burchfield had exceptional taste in literature. He loved the great Russians of the 19th century – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. He loved <i>Moby-Dick</i>. He read Yeats’ plays as early as 1915, and appreciated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winesburg, Ohio</i> when it was published in 1919. He adored Willa Cather and read all of her books as they were published. See this entry from Oct. 15, 1948:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The grass colors beautiful – orange yellow, sun-lit, rich reddish brown, pastel shades of pale brown pink, pale ochre, light gray creamy white, and some weed that gave off a slate gray color. With the sunlit fields of dead grass against a blue-black eastern sky, I thought of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Ántonia</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Burchfield graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916. He never received a conventional liberal-arts education but his culture was deep and broad. He loved music (especially Sibelius) and movies, and read for the best of reasons: pleasure and self-knowledge.</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-71852372243347145932018-03-17T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-17T00:00:05.959-05:00`Equally Inappropriate Words'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The list of words drained of meaning by overuse, laziness and intentional corruption has reached dictionary proportions. </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Awesome </i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">comes to mind first. Once reserved to describe the deity, it now signifies faux-enthusiastic agreement or endorsement: “I will pay the utility bill.” “Awesome!” The word is unusable and dead. More regrettably lost are </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">community</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> and </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">conversation. </i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Once humble and useful, such words now are verbal gestures without content. Users are interested not in communicating information but in signaling that they are the sort of people who care about what </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">community</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">and </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">conversation</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> used to mean. This phenomenon is not new, of course; merely accelerating. On this date, </span><a href="http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440317.html" style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">March 17, in 1944</a><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, Orwell not only diagnosed the ailment but proposed treatment:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“With no power to put my decrees into operation, but with as much authority as most of the exile ‘governments’ now sheltering in various parts of the world, I pronounce sentence of death on the following words and expressions: Achilles’ heel, jackboot, hydra-headed, ride roughshod over, stab in the back, petty-bourgeois, stinking corpse, liquidate, iron heel, blood-stained oppressor, cynical betrayal, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, jackal, hyena, blood-bath.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">For Orwell, the principal culprits are the Marxists and fellow travelers, whose descendants are still with us. Of the seventeen words, some have faded into yesterday’s clichés. Some have shifted meaning. Some have lost their Marxist context. One seldom hears “petty-bourgeois” anymore. “Mad dog” and “blood-bath” I might use ironically. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Drained of their 1940s political sense are “lackey” and “flunkey,” about which Orwell writes: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“. . . they and other equally inappropriate words are dug up for pamphleteering purposes. The result is a style of writing that bears the same relation to writing real English as doing a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture. It is just a question of fitting together a number of ready-made pieces. Just talk about hydra-headed jack-boots riding roughshod over blood-stained hyenas, and you are all right. For confirmation of which, see almost any pamphlet issued by the Communist Party—or by any other political party, for that matter.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-67325021272238584812018-03-16T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-16T00:00:07.512-05:00`Mathematical Formulae on the Wall'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Like me, one of my friends is a devoted reader of </span><a href="http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Laudator Temporis Acti</a><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, where on </span><a href="http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2018/03/distraction.html" style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thursday </a><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mike Gilleland posted a passage from David Garnett’s introduction to Anna Wickham’s </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Selected Poems</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">: “[S]he told me that she had taken Hall and Knight’s Algebra with her and had spent her time in the private asylum working out quadratic equations in order to keep her mind from dwelling on her situation and to overcome her rancour.” My friend is book-minded, and one allusion inevitably bleeds into the next. He writes:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I remembered Johnson’s advice to the clerk who was stealing, of all things, packing thread, a mysterious habit he wanted to break. Johnson advised the poor man to take up algebra. It’s a humorous story, but it’s a valuable one. It’s quite true. Johnson, prone to morbid thoughts, prey to the depredations of depression and despair,</span> <span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">had the great intelligence to know how to combat his propensities.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In Boswell’s account, Johnson’s warehouse clerk seeks the great man’s assistance because he is “oppressed by scruples of conscience.” The man works in a warehouse and is “often tempted to take paper and packthread enough for his own use, and that he had indeed done so often, that he could recollect no time when ever had bought any for himself.” Johnson suggests that the clerk’s boss would probably be “wholly indifferent with regard to such trivial emoluments.” The clerk knows that to be true because he has already told his master about the petty thievery, and the master told him to take as much thread as he wanted. Johnson tells him to “tease me no more about such airy nothings,” then concludes that “the fellow might be mad.” That’s when Johnson gives him pragmatic advice for relieving a guilty conscience:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Boswell concludes: “It is perhaps needless to add that this visitor came no more.” Our clerk suffered from over-scrupulosity. Depending on the severity of the case, Johnson’s prescription might have worked. I remembered stories of people in prison distracting themselves with mathematics. Odessa-born <a href="https://trachtenbergspeedmath.com/">Jakow Trachtenberg</a>, while held by the Nazis, devised a streamlined technique for making mental mathematical calculations. Simone Weil’s brother Andrew was the mathematician who, while held in a French prison shortly before the Nazi invasion, devised the Riemann hypothesis. And I remembered Arthur Koestler’s anecdote in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dialogue with Death</i> (1942), his account of being held prisoner by the Spanish Fascists during the Civil War. On the first day, angry, frightened and bored, he turns to math: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I took a piece of wire out of the bedstead and began to scrawl mathematical formulae on the wall. I worked out the equation of an ellipse; but I couldn’t manage the equation of a hyperbola. The formulae became so long that they reached from the W.C. to the wash-basin.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-21081178178103337032018-03-15T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-15T04:47:34.616-05:00`A Weak High-Ball at His Side'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">When I was a boy the word that effortlessly evoked adult sophistication, and thus envy, was a simple, old-fashioned Americanism, </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">highball</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">. I knew it meant an alcoholic drink, served to grownups in bars and bowling alleys, though its precise ingredients were a mystery. The word was a coded membership card, and I fancied someday telling a bartender: “Gimme a highball.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I found <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">highball</i>again while looking through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horsefeathers and Other Curious Words</i> (Harper &amp; Brothers, 1958), written by Charles Earle Funk of Funk and Wagnalls fame. Funk Sr. died while finishing the book and his son, Charles Earle Funk Jr., completed it. I enjoy lingering in such books, the eccentric offspring of proper dictionaries. Knowing nothing about the etymology of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">highball</i>, I was surprised by the Funks’ folksy entry for the word:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“There’s no doubt that this term has long been used by American railwaymen as that of a signal to the locomotive engineer to proceed. The signal itself was a ball large enough to be plainly visible which, when hoisted to the top of a mast at the approach to a small station, indicated that a train could proceed without stopping, that neither passenger, freight, nor express was awaiting it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i>substantiates this: “a signal to proceed given to a train driver, originally by raising a ball attached to a pole. Now chiefly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hist</i>.” A slightly earlier usage was applied to a card game, highball poker. I already knew the word’s secondary meaning as a verb: to speed, to hurry along without hesitation, perhaps with a hint of recklessness: “We better highball it if we want to beat the crowd.” So how did the railway term morph into the name of a cocktail? The Funk explanation is unsatisfactory:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Presumably this sense was somehow transferred to an iced alcoholic beverage about sixty years ago, but if so, the connection has not yet been determined. Possibly some passenger who had over-indulged in the beverage vaguely saw a resemblance between the floating ice at the top of the glass to the ball of the signal, and the tall glass to the mast.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i>offers an inclusive definition – “a drink of whisky and soda (or in later use other mixer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">esp</i>. ginger ale), served with ice in a tall, straight-sided glass. Later also (frequently with modifying word): any long mixed drink” – but no etymological explanation. One of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i> citations is to an article, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/454184?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“`Highball’ for `Tall Glass,’”</a> in the February 1965 issue of the journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Speech</i>. The author, Thomas Pyles, proposes an alternative theory, one I can substantiate with reference to my maternal step-grandfather, James Aloysius Kelly: The Irish and Irish-Americans call a whiskey glass a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ball</i>, as in a “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ball</i> of malt.” This theory makes intuitive sense. Pyles adds, rather pedantically: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“It is interesting to note that in sophisticated drinking circles the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">highball</i>has become practically archaic, or in any case almost as non-U [middle-class], alcoholically speaking, as asking the way to `the little boys’ (or girls’) room.’ `Social’ drinkers continue to cover the taste of whiskey with ginger ale, Seven Up, and the like in what they refer to as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">highball</i>, but the illuminati ask for `whiskey and water’ or `Scotch and soda’ and refer to ice cubes simply as `ice,’ not as `rocks’.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i>redeems its etymological failure however, by citing P. G. Wodehouse’s <i>Something Fresh</i> (1915): “Beyond Baxter, a cigar in his mouth and a weak high-ball at his side, the Earl of Emsworth took his ease.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[Of related interest: “beer and a bump,” meaning a shot of whisky and a beer chaser, better known as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">boilermaker</i>.]</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-85901147374530351032018-03-14T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-14T00:00:10.804-05:00`He Was Dull in a New Way'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">One might make a rubber stamp with these words on the business end: “He was dull in a new way.” Keep it handy, by the chair or bed where one customarily reads, and make sure the ink pad remains in working condition. You would be performing a public service. Imagine innocently stumbling upon a poem by, say, Philip Levine or Elizabeth Alexander. Please, think of the children. Should they be misled into believing prose is poetry and political blather is thought? Reach for the stamp, and don’t confuse it with censorship. One would never think of tearing the page from the binding, but a tactful touch of the stamp would give our most vulnerable readers fair warning. Consider it a variation on the surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The words, of course, are Dr. Johnson’s. The date is <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/boswell/james/osgood/chapter29.html">March 28, 1775</a>. He and Boswell, as the latter recounts in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life</i>, are dining at Mr. Thrale’s. As usual, Boswell is baiting and Johnson is biting: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He attacked [Thomas] Gray, calling him `a dull fellow.’ Boswell: `I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: `Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">If you need details, Johnson marshal’s plenty of evidence in his <a href="https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/gray.html">“Life of Gray.”</a> I remain fond of Gray’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard">“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”</a> though my fondness is sentimental. Even Johnson concedes the poem has its moments. In the final paragraph, Johnson explains why, and formulates one of his most memorable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mots</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning `Yet even these bones’ are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-35427716054035417902018-03-13T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-13T00:00:06.081-05:00`Without Contemporary Nonsense'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Larkin seems to me to write with an amazing directness, which certainly conceals a great deal of art, but always appears just to flow out. He is a poet without contemporary nonsense, including the nonsense of having no nonsense about him.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The word Anthony Powell brings to mind in his Larkin review is the elastic English monosyllable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bluff</i>. As an adjective, Johnson in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dictionary</i> gives “big, surly, blustering,” but that sense is too overheated for Larkin. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i> suggests a more measured meaning: “good-naturedly blunt, frank, or plain-spoken; rough and hearty.” It’s an old-fashioned English quality, perhaps near extinction, and could be applied to writers as various as Swift, Johnson, Cobbett, Macaulay and Orwell. “Rough and hearty” should not suggest crude or unsophisticated. Anti-Larkinites will mistake his anti-cant stance for "hate."&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">More interesting is Powell’s praise for Larkin’s no-nonsense approach to poetry, prose and life. The literary world tends to be present-focused and fashion-minded, blind to tradition and fancying itself a sort of evolutionary culmination, much superior to the benighted past. In fact, it is a provincial village, a cultural backwater. You will note that Larkin’s severest critics are a humorless bunch, impressed with their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">au courant</i>assumptions about everything, and cite <a href="https://allpoetry.com/A-Study-Of-Reading-Habits">“A Study of Reading Habits”</a> as evidence of the poet-librarian’s philistinism. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve reread Powell’s Larkin reviews and others collected in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miscellaneous Verdicts</i> (Heinemann, 1990) while reading Hilary Spurling’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time</i> (Hamish Hamilton, 2017). Larkin and Powell, while we were hardly looking, have become two of the most reliably pleasure-giving writers of the last century.</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-3293942269812705482018-03-12T00:00:00.000-05:002018-03-12T05:06:12.819-05:00`Fulness of Joy at So Much Life'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Charles Lamb was a city man, a species new in his day, who favored crowds, noise and stench to the charms of country living. He was the dedicated urbanite among the English Romantics, the emotional and aesthetic opposite of John Clare. Lamb died in 1834, two years before Dickens, the first significant city novelist, published </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Pickwick Papers. </i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Passages in this novel, in their exuberant absurdity, might have been written by Lamb. Here’s an exchange between Alfred Jingle and Mr. Pickwick from the second chapter:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“`Heads, heads--take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. `Terrible place-- dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round—mother’s head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?--fine place--little window--somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?--he didn't keep a sharp look-out enough either--eh, Sir, eh?’” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This could have been lifted from one of Lamb’s letters. Consider the one he wrote to Wordsworth on <a href="http://www.adnax.com/text/lamb01.htm">Jan. 30, 1801</a>. Wordsworth, who was living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, Gramere, had sent Lamb the second edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lyrical Ballads</i>. Lamb offers a detailed reading, largely sympathetic, of several poems in the collection. There’s a sense that Lamb is being careful of Wordsworth, who is thirty-one and already a self-styled sage. Lamb is twenty-five, and the Essays of Elia won’t be published for another twenty years. Tactfully, Lamb distinguishes his sensibility from Wordsworth’s: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Heresy, of course, to Romantics and their admirers. But Lamb isn’t so much denigrating the rural as celebrating the urban. In his reply to Wordsworth, he anticipates Gogol, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Zola, Joyce and Bellow in his London revelry:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masquerade - all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lamb has turned himself into a precursor of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">flâneur</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-41128566761404232252018-03-11T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-11T00:00:13.587-06:00`A Literary Mount Rushmore'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I have never seen a copy of <i>Aesopic</i>, subtitled <i>Twenty Four Couplets by Anthony Hecht to Accompany the Thomas Bewick Wood Engravings for Select Fables with an afterword on the blocks by Philip Hofer. </i>It was <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&amp;bx=off&amp;ds=30&amp;kn=Aesopic+Gehenna+Press+Hecht+Anthony&amp;sortby=1&amp;sts=t&amp;x=0&amp;y=0&amp;yrh=1967&amp;yrl=1967&amp;clickid=wq62EqXtUwDyzwAxl82Hi2F1Ukj2J001RS4v2A0&amp;cm_mmc=aff-_-ir-_-59879-_-77798&amp;ref=imprad59879&amp;afn_sr=impact">published by the Gehenna Press</a> in an edition of five-hundred in 1967 and today sells for as much as $960. To my knowledge Hecht never reprinted its contents, though in <i>The Hard Hours</i> (1968) he includes a suite of nine couplets titled&nbsp;<a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/improvisations-aesop">“Improvisations on Aesop.”</a> The editor of <i>The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht</i> (2013), Jonathan F.S. Post, quotes one of the <i>Aesopic</i> couplets, “The Nightingale,” in a footnote to the letter Hecht wrote to Ashley Brown on April 18, 1978:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“What is it to be free? The unconfined<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lose purpose, strength, and at the last, the mind.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Brown had used the lines as an epigraph to his essay <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40348235?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">“The Poetry of Anthony Hecht,”</a> published that year in <i>Ploughshares</i>.&nbsp; In his letter, Hecht relates “The Nightingale” to his frequent allusions to <i>King Lear</i>. His poems and Shakespeare play, he writes, “both touch on not so much madness as the <u>fear </u>of madness.” Hecht had his own Johnsonian anxieties about his sanity, but the couplet also suggests something about the composition of poetry and, by implication, all the arts. An “unconfined” poem is likely to be self-indulgent, flabby, atonal and dull – that is, like most contemporary poetry. An artist needs something to press against; namely, form. The best poets press hard and avoid tedium by devising unexpected variations in their formal patterns.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In a letter written two months earlier, Hecht replied to John Benson, who had lettered the word <i>AESOPIC</i> (<i>OED</i>: “of, relating to, or characteristic of Aesop, a semi-legendary Greek fabulist of the 6th cent. b.c.”) on the title page. Benson had asked whether Hecht would “consider writing lapidary inscription for a `group of standing stones.’” Hecht says he finds Benson’s letter “flattering and bewildering,” adding, “After all it isn’t every day I’m invited to become part of a literary Mount Rushmore, or given the promise of such marmoreal perpetuity.” Hecht treats the offer with politely ironic detachment, noting that such engraved texts – “the pious platitudes on post offices and court houses, or else the mortuary inscriptions <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html">`That teach the rustic moralist to die’”</a> – generally adhere to the “convention of their sentiments.” Hecht might have cited Dr. Johnson in the <i>Life</i>: “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath."<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hecht here reminds me of my involvement a decade ago with an American poet who died a few years back. Let me explain. He was renowned for drunken, online tantrums which often, in a morbid sort of way, were more interesting than his poems. I received several of his overheated emails, written in varying states of coherence. All smelled of Smirnoff’s. In his final collection, <i>The Darkness and the Light</i> (2001), Hecht included a two-part poem titled “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ewX2N5IpyQ0C&amp;pg=PT63&amp;lpg=PT63&amp;dq=anthony+hecht+lapidary+inscription+with+explanatory+note&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=aOHT6WH2my&amp;sig=P4wZ6xVnvR93N_jvdim4rYhOr3Y&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjYosyaxeLZAhUO7FMKHY4rDK8Q6AEILzAB#v=onepage&amp;q=anthony%20hecht%20lapidary%20inscription%20with%20explanatory%20note&amp;f=false">Lapidary Inscription with Explanatory Note</a>.” Here is the first part:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“There was for him no more perfect epitaph<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Than <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.1.4.html">this from Shakespeare</a>: `Nothing in his life<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Became him like his leaving it.’ All those<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Who knew him wished the son of a bitch in hell,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Despised his fawning sycophancy, smug<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Self-satisfaction, posturing ways and pig-<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Faced beady little eyes, his trite<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Mind, and attested qualities of a shit,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And felt the world immeasurably improved<o:p></o:p></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Right from the very moment that he left it.” &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-88701700437556100142018-03-10T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-10T08:14:13.354-06:00`We Attain the Great Art'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“He recommended to me to keep a journal of my life, full and unreserved.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This is Boswell recounting Johnson’s advice to him in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life</i> (1791). The time is July 1763. The men had met two months earlier, on May 16. Johnson was fifty-three; Boswell, twenty-two. Here is the corresponding sentence as found in Boswell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Journal 1762-1763</i> (McGraw-Hill, 1950), dated July 16, 1763:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Both work. I prefer the latter -- “advised” over “recommended,” and “fair and undisguised” over “full and unreserved.” The revisions don’t corrupt the sense but the latter, in my ear, sounds more euphonious, closer to the vernacular and thus more conversational and convincing. Hearing such distinctions, and forming preferences based on them is probably behavior peculiar to writers, who weigh every syllable. Here is the next sentence, first from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me great satisfaction when the particulars were faded from my remembrance.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Journal</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me infinite satisfaction when the ideas were faded from my remembrance.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A mixed reaction. I prefer the metaphorical exaggeration of “infinite” to the feeble “great,” and would choose “particulars” over “ideas.” We don’t remember ideas. Memories, the sort one might record in a journal, are distinguished by particularity. They may seem minute and trivial, but often that’s why we later treasure them. What was the color of my first girlfriend’s eye? I don’t remember. Here is the remainder of the paragraph in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I was uncommonly fortunate in having had a previous coincidence of opinion with him upon this subject, for I had kept such a journal for some time; and it was no small pleasure to me to have this to tell him, and to receive his approbation. He counselled me to keep it private, and said I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. From this habit I have been enabled to give the world so many anecdotes, which would otherwise have been lost to posterity. I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson: `There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Johnson’s wisdom caps the passage. Boswell’s genius is to defer to his friend, give him the best lines. The corresponding passage in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Journal</i> is more cluttered, less focused on setting up the punch line. Boswell reveals that he has been keeping a journal since leaving Scotland, and indulges in a self-celebrating rhapsody: “O my journal! art thou not highly dignified? Shalt though not flourish tenfold?” In the privacy of his journal, Boswell brags of “the sanction of Mr. Samuel Johnson.” In the quotation by Johnson that concludes the scene, Boswell changes a single word: ‘we attain the great knowledge” becomes “we attain the great art.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-79398578356660139322018-03-09T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-09T00:00:16.868-06:00`Feel the Loss of Much of Our Sun'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“The old downgrading of Boswell was accompanied by a downgrading of his friendship with Johnson. He was seen as a kind of remora fish attached by the suckers of flattery to a leviathan, occasionally brushed off by the impatient monster of the deep, though more often tolerated, at times half affectionately, but certainly never loved or even much respected.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">That’s the libelous party line, codified at least since 1831 when <a href="http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/macaulay.html">Macaulay reviewed</a> John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life of Johnson</i> and concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a great fool.” For Macaulay, Boswell was an idiot savant of literature, a whoring drunk and moral leper who inexplicably turned himself into a writer of genius. Macaulay’s censure postponed a proper assessment of Boswell’s achievement for more than a century. In <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=3ZFDAQAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA263&amp;lpg=PA263&amp;dq=james+boswell+thomas+carlyle+john+wilson+croker&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=PkaXvYQue7&amp;sig=12Gxtp-85kfcFCCkc_mT2Zws2Gw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiQmsL2t93ZAhUBOawKHe8iCbsQ6AEITzAI#v=onepage&amp;q=james%20boswell%20thomas%20carlyle%20john%20wilson%20croker&amp;f=false">his review of the same edition</a>, Carlyle was less dismissive than Macaulay but unleashed an even more colorful cataract of venom at Boswell the man: “. . . he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio; curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb.” No one is as entertainingly vituperative as Carlyle when he’s in a snit, as when he itemizes Boswell’s “bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more [and] that coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin.” He tops it off by finding Boswell guilty of “sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The discovery of Boswell’s journals in the 1920s and 1930s, and the publication of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Journal 1762-1763 </i>in 1950, followed by subsequent volumes in the series, sparked an ongoing reassessment. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Life of James Boswell</i> (1999), Peter Martin writes: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“At first, the journals appeared to confirm the nineteenth-century perception of Boswell as a compulsive womanizer, drinker and gambler, a habitual gallant who only seemed happy when acting the fool. But readers soon began to see him as a highly complex figure, someone they thought they understood and with whom they were prepared to travel the extra mile. His honesty, sincerity, geniality, sensitivity, and desire to become a better human being are partly responsible for this change of perception. His journals also show him to be a conscientious and talented writer. Perhaps most importantly, they reveal the degree of mental suffering he endured for most of his lifetime.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The witty remora metaphor at the top is the work of the late Louis Auchincloss in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love without Wings: Some Friendships in Literature and Politics</i> (1991). Auchincloss argues that while Boswell and Johnson each “used” the other and that both possessed “greatly developed egos,” a deep and mutually gratifying friendship evolved between them. It was “very probably the deepest to which either was ever a partner.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Auchincloss is serious about friendship, suggesting we have customarily treated it with less attentiveness and care than other relationships. “Most of us spend a large part of our lives in the company of friends and would feel the loss of much of our sun without them,” he writes in his preface, adding: “There is no commandment in the Decalogue to honor a friend.” Through the lens of friendship, Auchincloss looks at something even larger: what it means to be human. He explores fifteen friendships, including Henry Adams and John Hay, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Margaret Jourdain, Edith Wharton and Margaret Chanler, Arthur Hallam and Lord Tennyson. As a novelist, he is intrigued by the subject, its stickiness, contradictions and deep satisfactions. In passing, Auchincloss makes shrewd observations about writing, his subjects and human nature in general. He’s very good on Compton-Burnett, a novelist I’ve often lobbied for but never with success:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“She was not much impressed by human love or even by human hate, both of which she probably felt had been overrated by artists through the ages. In her view we differ from beasts essentially in two respects: in our speech and in our striving for power, and to these her novels are largely addressed. Her characters are locked in constant conflict as to who shall rule the home, and they express their arguments in the concise and limpid prose of La Rochefoucauld.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-3149141245976121482018-03-08T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-08T00:00:00.277-06:00`Provided That It Serves Another's Good'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Kingsley Amis sold his papers to the Huntington Library in 1984 and lived another eleven years. Included in the first shipment of manuscripts, delivered in 1987, was an untitled, undated poem that is probably also unfinished. Amis’ biographer, Zachary Leader, believes the poem dates from the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, when Amis was soon to turn sixty. It was first published in </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Times Literary Supplement</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> in May 2004:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Things tell less and less:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The news impersonal<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And from afar; no book<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Worth wrenching off the shelf.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Liquor brings dizziness<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And food discomfort; all<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Music sounds thin and tired,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And what picture could earn a look?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The self drowses in the self<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Beyond hope of a visitor.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Desire and those desired<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Fade, and no matter:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Memories in decay<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Annihilate the day.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">There once was an answer:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Up at the stroke of seven,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A turn round the garden<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">(Breathing deep and slow),<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then work, never mind what,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">How small, provided that<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">It serves another’s good<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">But once is long ago<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And, tell me, how could<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Such an answer be less than wrong,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Be right all along?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Vain echoes, desist”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">An old man watches as life’s pleasures and purpose evaporate. “Vain echoes,” indeed – of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07">Larkin</a>, of course, and, less likely, Beckett in the final lines. The surprise for many readers begins in line fifteen and continues: “Then work, never mind what, / How small, provided that / It serves another’s good.” Amis detractors will find this laughable. The novelist carefully crafted his curmudgeonly image, but readers of Paul Fussell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters</i> (1994) know better. For Amis, serving another’s good didn’t mean public displays of virtue (“virtue signaling,” as the cliché has it). “Another’s good” means generosity of spirit; for a writer, the obligation to be a munificent host and entertain his readers. Few recent writers of fiction are less pretentious and more amusing than Amis at his best. Name a novel funnier than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky Jim</i>. (There are a few. Go ahead.) Willful obscurity implies a minging contempt for readers.</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-75066573568628872202018-03-07T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-07T00:00:27.140-06:00`A Scene from a Grade B Thriller'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“She treated me always with the slightly irritated kindness of one charged with the care of a not terribly bright grandson. But I was what God had sent, and she seemed, in the end, grateful for small favors.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Thanks to a tip from a reader I learned that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/i282980"><i>The Russian Review</i> published an issue in October 2002 </a>devoted to remembrances of Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), including <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/news/2015/07/24/clarence-brown-pioneer-modern-russian-literature-and-translation-dies">the late Clarence Brown</a>’s “Memories of Nadezhda.” Readers owe Brown an unpayable debt. In 1965, he published his translation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prose of Osip Mandelstam</i> (an expanded edition, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Noise of Time: Selected Prose</i>, was published by North Point Press in 1986). Cambridge University Press brought out his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mandelstam</i>, the first biography of the poet in any language, in 1973. Soon came <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Poems</i> (1974), translated by Brown and W. S. Merwin, and the memoirs of the poet’s widow, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Against Hope</i> (1970) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Abandoned</i> (1974). Elsewhere, Brown describes her as “vinegary, Brechtian, steel-hard woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions, permanent convictions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In his memoir, Brown recounts his first trip to the Soviet Union, in 1965, when he visited Nadezhda in her two-room apartment in Moscow. Her history of “serial betrayal,” Brown writes, earned her “every right to a terminal case of paranoia. That she was no more than morbidly suspicious and careful should be seen as a sign of mental health.” Mandelstam took for granted that the KGB was listening: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“She assumed that every word we exchanged over that kitchen table was heard and recorded. After a while, I myself began to sense that there was always a third partner to our conversations, though what the poor eavesdropper could possibly make of my persistent probing into the link between the meter of a line and its meaning is more than I can imagine.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Brown offers a rare and memorable Western glimpse of Varlam Shalamov, not yet known to the English-speaking world as the author of the remarkable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kolyma Tales</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The most imposing visitor whom I encountered across the kitchen table was Varlam<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Shalamov, a man who had spent decades in the camps and, far from weakened by the experience, had grown into a human replica of some gnarled pine weathered on a Pacific palisade. His hands played over the books and manuscripts on the table like creatures from the prehistory of man, but eager to catch up. He was there several times a week. My speaking Russian struck him as miraculous: a stone with the power of articulate speech. That there were others like me he refused to believe.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Brown describes how he smuggled the manuscript of Mandelstam’s first memoir, still untitled, out of her apartment and the Soviet Union – “a scene from a Grade B thriller.” He gave it the title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Against Hope</i>, which he named after her<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. Nadezhda</i> means <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hope</i>. In his brief remembrance, Jack F. Matlock Jr., who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 t0 1991, captures some of Mandelstam’s defiant, hard-boiled manner: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“We sat down and, when I resumed my chatter, she burst out in English, `Why are we speaking that language of slaves? I’d much prefer if we spoke English. One feels so much freer.’ And so we did, she in her very precise diction and marked British accent. It is hard for me to believe that she really had a hatred for the Russian language. She probably just wanted to put the KGB to the extra trouble of having to translate rather than merely transcribe the tapes of our conversation.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-38005021239738246692018-03-06T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-06T04:42:28.918-06:00`Unswayed by Critics and by Vogue Undaunted'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Last Friday, Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti </span><a href="http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2018/03/letter-to-teacher-of-english.html" style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">posted a poem by Robert Hillyer</a><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">, “Letter to a Teacher of English.” It’s old-fashioned and cranky but charmingly so, and at its heart is the love of language and literature:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“First would I have my scholar learn the tongue<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">He never learned to speak when he was young;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then would I have him read therein, but merely<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In the great books, to understand them clearly.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">O that our living literature could be<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Our sustenance, not archaeology!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hillyer (1895-1961) was only a name to me. I couldn’t place him, though he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. Another friend wrote to say: “I don’t know that anyone reads Hillyer anymore.” Sad but accurate. Careerists ought to take the hint: Immortality by way of poetry is unlikely. My friend included in his email an excerpt from another Hillyer poem, “A Letter to Robert Frost.” Hillyer was a dissenter when it came to literary modernism, except for the work of his friend Frost. The poem is modestly interesting, a rigorous exercise in iambic pentameter couplets:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Ours is a startling friendship, because art,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Mother of quarrels who tears friends apart,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Has bound us ever closer, mind and heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I wanted to look a little deeper into Hillyer, so I borrowed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Relic &amp; Other Poems</i> (Knopf, 1957). “In My Library, Late Afternoon” starts promisingly:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“In the dim library, my younger self<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Drifts with possessive hands from shelf to shelf,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Haunting familiar volumes, he can quote them<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">More eloquently than the men who wrote them,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Because he adds a private overtone<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">From old associations of his own.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This is true to my experience. Books we first loved long ago and return to with some regularity become suffused with our various selves. A book is a palimpsest of “old associations.” While reading it, we read ourselves. Hillyer even takes a swipe at what we would call “genre”:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The notion that old books can be bewitched<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">By aspects of a life they have enriched<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Might strike the casual reader who pursues<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Detective fiction down a maze of clues<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">As somewhat morbid—yet I find it more so<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">To read all night about a missing torso.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hillyer next rejects “the new critic, happy jargoneer, / Who makes obscure what once was clear.” At this point, the poem turns mushy for a stanza and half, but Hillyer recovers nicely:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Unswayed by critics and by vogue undaunted,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I am content among the books I’ve haunted:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The oftener they’re read, the more they give.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In them my cumulative past shall live<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Until, our long collaboration done,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I melt in earth, they in the lexicon.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Reading forgotten poets can be a goad to humility. Nor should we dismiss their work without first reading it. Hillyer is a minor poet by any reasonable standard, but the triumph of modernism doesn’t erase the work that preceded or ignored it. There is no such thing as progress in literature. My friend writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“One could do worse, I’d say, than every now and then going back and reading those poets one read in college, poets who have been pretty much forgotten. Does anybody read Vachel Lindsay these days (I heard him once on phonograph record chant one of his poems)? Elinor Wylie? H. D.? Ransom? Or Sara Teasdale, whose poetry fed my young imagination with all those things young imaginations dine on?”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-5467519304968797732018-03-05T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-05T00:00:04.885-06:00`I Looked at the World with New Eyes'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">March 5, 1953 is one of those dates – others include April 30, 1945, and May 2, 2011 – remembered and celebrated by civilized people around the world. When a monster dies, the moral order seems restored, though we know another will take his place. To calculate the scale of killing by Stalin and his machine calls for algorithms yet unwritten. There are too many variables, though the outcome is absolute in each case. What can be stated with confidence is that Stalin murdered as many as 60 million people. Cautious as always, Robert Conquest reports in the 2007 edition of </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Great Terror</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> that precise numbers will never be known but at least 15 million people were killed “by the whole range of the Soviet regime’s terrors.” And what about the millions of casual killings never recorded? And though he out-performed Hitler, let’s remember that Stalin was a slacker compared to Mao. In </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hope Abandoned </i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">(trans. Max Hayward, 1974), Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls hearing the news:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“`Stalin is dead!’ she shouted now, from my doorway. I went cold all over and pulled her into the room. As long as a dictator lives he is immortal. I decided my colleague must finally have taken leave of her senses: for such words you could easily be accused of plotting to kill the Leader and be packed off to rot in a camp to the end of your days.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Though dead, Stalin still controls his subjects. Even for so tough and stoical a survivor as Mandelstam, her first reaction is fear.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I switched on the radio and was overcome by a joy such as I had never known before in the whole of my life. It was true: the Immortal One was dead. I now rejoiced as I went on packing my wretched rags and tatters, and for the first time in many years I looked at the world with new eyes.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-65435961476937332472018-03-04T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-04T07:27:40.157-06:00`A Clean Strike Every Time'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This sucker visited <a href="http://www.kaboombooks.com/">Kaboom Books</a> on Saturday and netted fortune. First, Swift’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Complete Poems</i> (Yale University Press, 1983) edited by Pat Rogers. After <a href="http://quarterlyconversation.com/on-jonathan-swifts-poetry">I recommended</a> the Penguin reprint of the book, a reader expressed interest and I gave it to him. Eight years later, the hole is plugged. Here is an old favorite, “The Place of the Damned” (1731):<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“All folks, who pretend to religion and grace,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Allow there’s a Hell, but dispute of the place:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">But, if Hell may by logical rules be defin’d<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The place of the damn’d — I'll tell you my mind.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Wherever the damn’d do chiefly abound,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Most certainly there is Hell to be found:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d poets, damn’d criticks, damn’d blockheads, damn’d knaves,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d senators brib’d, damn’d prostitute slaves;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d lawyers and judges, damn’d lords and damn’d squires;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d spies and informers, damn’d friends, and damn’d liars;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d villains, corrupted in every station;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d timeserving priests all over the nation;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And into the bargain I'll readily give you<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Damn’d ignorant prelates and counsellors privy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then let us no longer by parsons be flamm’d,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">For we know by these marks the place of the damn’d:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And Hell to be sure is at Paris or Rome.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">How happy for us that it is not at home!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Rogers notes that “flamm’d” means “deceived by a sham story.” The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i> confirms the word is related to our modern “flim-flam” – humbug or a confidence trick. Swift’s savage grace with words is nicely captured in a passage from the other book I found at Kaboom: “His sentences soar like laminated boomerangs, luring the reader’s eye until they swoop in and dart across the mind like bright-eyed hummingbirds, for a clean strike every time.” You’ll find that in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Honest Rainmaker</i>(Doubleday &amp; Co., 1953) by A.J. Liebling. I’ve been reading and collecting Liebling’s books for about forty years, and this is my fourth first edition. The Library of America, when it published Liebling in two volumes, chose to leave out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Honest Rainmaker </i>(and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Second City</i>), which is a shame. Liebling devotes the entire book to the renowned flim-flam man James A. Macdonald, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aka</i> Colonel John R. Stingo, a New York racing writer who worked for the precursor of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The National Enquirer</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stingo</i>, for the uninitiated, is an old English word for “strong ale or beer,” and came to mean “vigour, energy, vim” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OED</i>). The sentence at the top is from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Honest Rainmaker</i>, as is this, which Liebling consigns to a footnote:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-38912097850510747892018-03-03T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-04T10:34:37.854-06:00`What Satanic Arrogance'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I’ve come to think of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s volumes of memoir – </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hope Against Hope </i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">(1970) and </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hope Abandoned</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> (1974), both translated by Max Hayward – as the twentieth century’s foundational texts. To use a reviewer’s cliché, they are “essential reading,” unlike any English-language volumes from the same period I can think of, except perhaps Whitttaker Chambers’ </span><i style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">Witness</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">. By recounting in detail her life and her husband’s in their present and recent past, she foretells much of the future, our present.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In <a href="https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/3/soviet-fate-russian-hope-9579">“Soviet Fate, Russian Hope,”</a> published in the March issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New Criterion</i>, Jacob Howland describes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Against Hope</i>, as “an invaluable account of the collapse of intellectual life and the terror and bleakness of everyday existence at the height of ideological tyranny.” Howland isn’t shy about drawing parallels:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“How did things come to such a pass? [Mandelstam] sheds light on the matter in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Against Hope</i>, and especially in the more expansive and desultory reflections of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Abandoned</i>. `The basic error of our times,’ she writes, was the replacement of `the idea of popular education . . . by the political concept of indoctrination.’ (`What do the people need to be indoctrinated for? What satanic arrogance you need to impose your own views like this!’) The `accumulated riches’ of culture and tradition were deliberately spurned and forgotten, and the `religion’ of `progressive’ ideology—`the idea . . . that people can foresee the future, change the course of history and make it rational’—was speciously elevated to the rank of science.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sound familiar? Howland, however, carefully refuses to devise a one-to-one correspondence between the U.S. in 2018 and the USSR in, say, 1938 (the year Mandelstam’s husband, Osip, was murdered): “Although we do not live in anything like the USSR, all of this has begun to feel weirdly and depressingly familiar. In the United States, public schools and the media, as well as the wider spheres of culture and commerce, have become theaters for the contentious enactment of identity politics, which crudely subsumes individuals into broad and largely arbitrary categories.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope Abandoned, </i>Mandelstam abominates any naively rosy understanding of human nature: “Everything we have been through here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human behavior.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Mandelstam may be the most bitterly ironic writer (and she is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">writer</i>, not merely a documentarian) since Swift. Her narrative is unrelenting, and she leaves us—her oh-so-fortunate Western readers -- feeling like callow teenagers: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. Read the final paragraph of Chap. 41, “The Years of Silence,” in full:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“This book, which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">samizdat</i> or has found it ways into print (as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain. Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really succeed in their task of universal destruction?”</span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-31622622056903947432018-03-02T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-02T00:00:11.216-06:00`An Almost Comic Ambiguity'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He was at his old trick: he had made out, on the spot, in other words, that here was a pale page into which he might read what he liked.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">My wife has flown to Virginia for her father’s eightieth birthday. He lives in Fredericksburg, hardly a musket shot away from the battlefield. In twenty years I’ve tramped most of its 8,300 acres. When Henry James returned to the United States in 1904-05 for his first visit in twenty years, he must have passed Fredericksburg on his way from Washington, D.C. to Richmond. Forty years earlier the latter had served as the capital of the Confederacy. James tours “the White House of Richmond, the `executive mansion’ of the latter half of the War,” the onetime residence of Jefferson Davis. During his visit it was a “Museum of the relics of the Confederacy.” Today it houses part of the multi-site <a href="https://acwm.org/">American Civil War Museum</a>. The sentence at the top, in which James is describing his visit to the museum, is from Chap. VII of <i><a href="http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/americanscene2.html">The American Scene</a> </i>(1907). Writing in the third-person, James often refers to himself as “the restless analyst.” As usual, the Jamesian consciousness absorbs everything:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Tragically, indescribably sanctified, these documentary chambers that contained, so far as I remember, not a single object of beauty, scarce one in fact that was not altogether ugly (so void they were of intrinsic charm), and that spoke only of the absence of means and of taste, of communication and resource. In these rude accents they phrased their interest--which the unappeased visitor, from the moment of his crossing the general threshold, had recognized in fact as intense.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">James’ only companion is the hostess, “a little old lady, a person soft-voiced, gracious, mellifluous, perfect for her function, who, seated by her fire in a sort of official anteroom, received him as at the gate of some grandly bankrupt plantation.” James’ tone is finely nuanced. Does he like the old lady, sole guardian of this mausoleum of the Lost Cause? He concedes that she, unlike the exhibits she guards, had beauty. We might call his tone satirical sadness. It’s a gloomy place, four decades after Appomattox. Read closely his encounter with “a very handsome, young Virginian,” whose father had fought in the war. James parses the enduring allure of the “valuable, enriching, inspiring, romantic legend.” With the aid of the old lady, James observes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">“The sorry objects about were old Confederate documents, already sallow with time, framed letters, orders, autographs, extracts, tatters of a paper-currency in the last stages of vitiation; together with faded portraits of faded worthies, primitive products of the camera, the crayon, the brush; of all of which she did the honours with a gentle florid reverence that opened wide, for the musing visitor, as he lingered and strolled, the portals, as it were, of a singularly interesting `case.’ [Note the Jamesian quotation marks.] &nbsp;It was the case of the beautiful, the attaching oddity of the general Southern state of mind, or stage of feeling, in relation to that heritage of woe and of glory of which the mementos surrounded me. These mementos were the sorry objects, and as I pursued them from one ugly room to another--the whole place wearing the air thus, cumulatively, of some dim, dusty collection of specimens, prehistoric, paleolithic, scientific, and making one grope for some verbal rendering of the grey effect--the queer elements at play wrote themselves as large as I could have desired. On every side, I imagine, from Virginia to Texas, the visitor must become aware of them--the visitor, that is, who, by exception, becomes aware of anything: was I not, for instance, presently to recognize them, at their finest, for an almost comic ambiguity, in the passionate flare of the little frontal inscription behind which the Daughters of the Confederacy of the Charleston section nurse the old wrongs and the old wounds?”</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Who else would admit to seeing "comic ambiguity" in a museum dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy?</span>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-36049634914805150122018-03-01T00:00:00.000-06:002018-03-01T04:21:37.200-06:00`The Moan of Doves in Immemorial Elms'<span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12pt;">From a note a friend sent me on Wednesday:</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“This morning I read in Tennyson’s songs from <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/791/791-h/791-h.htm">`The Princess.’</a> I don’t know that any poet writing in English ever had a better ear than Tennyson. He is best taken in small doses. Too much Tennyson and the costive imagination needs the purgative of Larkin.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Better ear? Aim high. Milton, Keats, Richard Wilbur (who would have turned ninety-seven today)? At that level of accomplishment, ranking is an act of ingratitude. My friend is right about small doses of Tennyson. His caloric content can be dangerously high. I love this from Part I of “The Princess”:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">That on the stretch’d forefinger of all Time<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sparkle for ever.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And this from a song in Part IV:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The splendour falls on castle walls<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And snowy summits old in story:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The long light shakes across the lakes,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And the wild cataract leaps in glory.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And Part VII:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Sweet is every sound,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The moan of doves in immemorial elms,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And murmuring of innumerable bees.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Memorize those final two lines (it won’t take long). In the shower this morning or on the drive to work, sing them to yourself. Let the m’s hum in your mouth like a hive of bees.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-82426522988002475932018-02-28T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-28T00:00:14.082-06:00`A Pudency So Rosy'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m reading <i>Cymbeline</i> again, a play I neglected when young, as I did most of the late works except for <i>The Tempest</i>. All thirty-five lines in <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/70/4625.html">Act II, Scene 5</a> are spoken by&nbsp;Posthumus Leonatus, who is in Rome, staying in the house of Philario. He speaks of Imogen. These lines contain the word that stopped me:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“O! vengeance, vengeance;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A pudency so rosy the sweet view on ’t&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">As chaste as unsunn’d snow. O! all the devils!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Pudency</span></i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">? Its echoes are unlikely, given the context: <i>prudency</i>, <i>pudendum</i>, <i>pudendal, impudence</i>. The <i>OED</i> cites Shakespeare’s as the first usage, and defines it as “modesty, bashfulness, or reticence; embarrassment.” George Meredith’s use in <i>The Egoist</i> may allude to Posthumus’ speech: “Though they are often . . . wantonly desperate in their acts, their tongues are curbed by rosy pudency.” Where had I read this word before? And why had I remembered enough to hear a whisper but not remember where? That’s what makes the internet a useful supplement to the dictionary. In thirty seconds I had my answer: <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=kU8FwLi-K7EC&amp;pg=PR7&amp;lpg=PR7&amp;dq=geoffrey+hill+the+triumph+of+love+Last+things+first;+the+slow+haul+to+forgive+them&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=4ExGxWpJA7&amp;sig=Sq3S9_ZEVyrciClCGsLlKIbOBfc&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjqjoH448bZAhWD6oMKHdPsDWYQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&amp;q=geoffrey%20hill%20the%20triumph%20of%20love%20Last%20things%20first%3B%20the%20slow%20haul%20to%20forgive%20them&amp;f=false">Section X </a>of Geoffrey Hill’s <i>The Triumph of Love</i> (1998), the volume that has come to seem like his best (difficult to say with certainty with a poet so prolific in his final twenty years):<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Last things first; the slow haul to forgive them:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Chamberlain's compliant vanity, his pawn ticket saved<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">from the antepenultimate ultimatum; their strict<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">pudency, but not to national honour; callous<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">discretion; their inwardness with things of the world;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">their hearing as a profound music<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">the hollow lion-roar of slammed vaults;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">the decent burials at the eleventh hour:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">their Authorized Version - it has seen better days - <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">`nation shall not lift up sword against nation’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">or `nation shall rise up against’ (a later <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">much-revised draft of the treaty). In either case<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">a telling figure out of rhetoric,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">epanalepsis, the same word first and last.”</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Chamberlain is Hill’s model of the fecklessly appeasing politician. The Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia happened when Hill was six years old. As usual, his preoccupation is theological. The section begins with “Last things first” and concludes with “the same word first and last” – the rhetorical device known as epanalepsis: “a figure by which the same word or clause is repeated after intervening matter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-76144151394766843292018-02-27T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-27T04:40:20.088-06:00`Almost a Remembrance'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Fine </span></i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">is one of those small English words dense with multiple, contradictory meanings. Used colloquially, we’ve reduced it to a flavorless synonym for “nice” or “okay.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i>OED </i>spells out a small<i> </i>dictionary-within-a-dictionary of meanings, from “of good or excellent quality; superior, select” to “free from turbidity.” Closest to Keats’ usage is probably “subtle; minute, precise,” which makes “fine excess” a muted oxymoron, and describes his own best poems, where the language is almost excessive, as in Shakespeare. It teeters on the edge of purple. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The experience Keats describes in the rest of the sentence is rare and precious – when another’s words read like our own, like an old memory, as when Keats writes: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53210/on-the-grasshopper-and-cricket">“The Poetry of earth is never dead.”</a> “Singularity” implies self-conscious eccentricity, oddness for its own sake, not as the expression of the poet’s sensibility. Keats calls his ideals “axioms,” as in geometry. They are assumed to be true and serve as the premise of all that follows. Later in the letter, Keats is less convincing when he formulates a Romantic article of faith: “But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it - And this leads me to another axiom - That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” Most good poems are labored over, revised sometimes for years.</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The passages quoted are from <a href="http://www.john-keats.com/briefe/270218.htm">the letter Keats wrote</a> two-hundred years ago on this date, Feb. 27, to his publisher John Taylor, who was editing <i>Endymion</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-85980991866401565972018-02-26T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-26T00:00:08.184-06:00`Of Exceptional Warmth and Goodness'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In a throwaway phrase, Philip Larkin distills the enduring charm and importance of Louis Armstrong and his music: “good-humoured virtuosity.” I hear the words equally stressed. “Good-humoured” because that was Armstrong’s nature, despite the impossible circumstances into which he was born. He knew joy and made it his artistic mission to share it with listeners. He was, unashamedly, an entertainer. “Virtuosity” because no else played so forcefully and beautifully, and by doing so changed the nature of the art he practiced, jazz. Taken together, these two qualities converge in happiness for listeners. I know of no other music that so reliably lifts my spirit and reminds me to feel grateful simply for being alive. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">We had lunch with <a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/">Terry Teachout</a> on Sunday and then drove a few blocks to see his play, <i>Satchmo at the Waldorf</i>. Terry is directing the production at the Alley Theater here in Houston. It’s a tour de force of acting. For two hours, one man, Jerome Preston Bates, plays three roles – Armstrong; his white manager, Joe Glaser; and Miles Davis. Armstrong’s language is jubilantly obscene, and early in the show we heard gasps coming from others in the audience. The language never let up but the gasping subsided. Terry’s Armstrong is, as we ought to expect of human beings, a complicated man. For the backstory, read Terry’s <i>Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong</i> (2009) &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">When Larkin appeared as the guest on the BBC’s <i><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009n0l8">Desert Island Discs</a></i> in 1976, Larkin’s first choice was Armstrong's 1929 recording of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=789Co-Ad1AY">“Dallas Blues.”</a> In his review of two Armstrong books, published in the <i>Guardian</i> in 1971, Larkin writes:</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“. . . in spite of the world-wide recognition as an international figure, we may still be only on the threshold of understanding his true significance. Of course he was an artist of Flaubertian purity, and a character of exceptional warmth and goodness. But has anyone yet seen him as the Chaucer, say, of the culture of the twenty-first century? While we are wondering whether to integrate with Africa, Armstrong (and Ellington, and Waller, and all the countless others) has done it behind our backs.”&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-9829176338315191872018-02-25T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-25T08:43:01.133-06:00`I Stink in the Midst of Respect'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Assessing the balance of good and bad, innocent and guilty, in our natures is always a trial. On all sides a moral inventory is seduced by the charms of self-celebration and self-denigration. We may not be good but we’re seldom as bad as we suspect. Odd to think that others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. On this date, Feb. 25, in 1824, Charles Lamb <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ptdmAAAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA142&amp;lpg=PA142&amp;dq=february+25+charles+lamb+letters&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=_QC2HfTiXA&amp;sig=P5cBSiTg6xUYxYLIHgwerG8pWNs&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiWo5_Sp7_ZAhWBv1MKHaRsA0kQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&amp;q=february%2025%20charles%20lamb%20letters&amp;f=false">writes to his friend Bernard Barton</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“And yet I am accounted by some people a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don’t borrow money, nor twist your kitten’s neck off, nor&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;">disturb a congregation, &amp;c.--your business is done. I know things (thoughts or things — thoughts are things) of myself, which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient. I once * * *, and set a dog upon a crab’s leg that was shoved out under a mass of sea weeds, a pretty little feeler.--Oh! pah! how sick I am of that; and a lie, a mean one, I</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">once told! —”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">This is Lamb, whose conscience is ruled by comedy. There’s no way to gauge how sincere he intends his self-reproach. He makes fun of the notion that goodness consists of adhering to a list of simple rules, my favorite being “not twist[ing] the kitten’s neck off.” That’s “cash-register honesty” – public gestures of virtue that neatly exclude us from culpability. We don’t steal but fabricate tax deductions, and gossip about our neighbors – such are the guilty pleasures of a non-criminal sinner. Lamb goes on:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I stink in the midst of respect. I am much hypt; the fact is, my head is heavy, but there is hope, or if not, I am better than a poor shell-fish — not morally, when I set the whelp upon it, but have more blood and spirits; things may turn up, and I may creep again into a decent opinion of myself. Vanity will return with sunshine. Till when, pardon my neglects, and impute it to the wintry solstice.”</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">[Lamb slightly misquotes the line from Pope’s <i>Dunciad</i>: “Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.”]&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-8040790551605006512018-02-24T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-24T00:00:00.242-06:00`Amused, Amazed, or Excited'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">After <a href="http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2018/02/inclusion-in-this-gallimaufry.html">Wednesday’s post</a> about the anthologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rossa_Cole">William Rossa Cole</a>, Dana Gioia wrote to remind me of literary evanescence:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“He is a forgotten figure today, but he actually made his meager living on poetry. Bill wrote for the non-academic reader of poetry. He covered the subject for <i>Saturday</i> <i>Review</i> and did a whole series of popular anthologies, mostly of comic verse. I own at least half a dozen of those collections, all used, which I picked up in different places over the years. What the books all have in common is that they had more or less been read to pieces by their previous owners.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Which is the truest critical accolade. Readers, common and otherwise, are the ultimate critics. Sadly, the “non-academic reader of poetry” is an endangered species. I know of seven. Dana added: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Bill’s other specialty was the short poem--ten lines and under. I have never found a book he edited which I haven’t read <i>in toto</i>with pleasure, which is more than I can say for Helen Vendler or Harold Bloom who seem under the sway of the goddess Dullness. Bill read voraciously, and he was often the first person to champion poets who otherwise would not have been noticed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">From the library I borrowed <i>Eight Lines and Under: An Anthology of Short, Short Poems</i>, an anthology Cole edited for Macmillan in 1967. In his introduction, Cole credits an unlikely trio of poets with suggesting such a collection: George Barker, Leonard Cohen and J.V. Cunningham. All had chosen poems of four to six lines to include in an earlier anthology, <i><a href="http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-shall-not-miss-things-i-miss.htm">Poet’s Choice</a></i>. “This set me to thinking about the beauty of brevity, and, with no ulterior anthologistic purpose, I began copying attractive short poems and stuffing them in a filed. Thus, over five years, this anthology accreted.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m sympathetic to Cole’s criteria. Poets can be at least as gaseous as politicians. If your name is not Homer, Virgil or Dante, think twice about trying to write a long poem. The twentieth century is littered with botched attempts. Cole includes four poems by the famously laconic Cunningham, none longer than six lines, and two of two lines, including one of his best:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“This <i>Humanist </i>whom no beliefs constrained<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Cole’s taste is often good. He includes “Exeunt” by Richard Wilbur:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Piecemeal the summer dies;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">At the field's edge a daisy lives alone;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A last shawl of burning lies<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">On a gray field-stone.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“All cries are thin and terse;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The field has droned the summer's final mass;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A cricket like a dwindled hearse<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Crawls from the dry grass.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Cole includes one of his own poems, “Time Piece,” a witty meditation on human vanity: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Take the back off the watch<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">and see that universe of small parts,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">bobbing and turning,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">each doing what it should be doing,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">and ignoring you completely.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Cole modestly closes his introduction:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“This anthology is not trying to prove anything about trends, schools, or movements; it is simply claiming, `Here are a couple of hundred short, short poems, each of which has amused, amazed, or excited the compiler.’ To say more would be to bring suspicion on my praise of brevity. The last word is <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69379/an-essay-on-criticism">Alexander Pope’s</a>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“`Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-46925876889213209972018-02-23T00:00:00.000-06:002018-02-23T00:00:09.956-06:00`Of Authors My Favorite is Tolstoy'<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Long or short, most autobiographies are deadly exercises in self-aggrandizement and creative remembering. We cherish the good ones – by Berlioz, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Adams, Nabokov, Whittaker Chambers – for their rarity. Not coincidentally, all five merge History with personal histories, suggesting that more is at stake than the writer’s precious vanity. There is at least one more good one, and it’s a mere 200 words long. Dense with facts and autobiography-spoofing irony, Chekhov’s capsule bio comes in a letter to V. A. Tikhonov (1857-1914), a playwright, Chekhov admirer and editor of a magazine, <i>North</i>,<i> </i>who had asked for information to accompany a photograph. On this date, Feb. 23, in 1892, Chekhov begins with a straightforward recitation of facts: “I was born in Taganrog in 1860. . .” With the sixth sentence, the tone changes:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“In 1891 I made a tour in Europe, where I drank excellent wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I took part in an orgy in the company of V. A. Tihonov [<i>sic</i>:<i> </i>Constance Garnett’s transliteration] at a name-day party.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then another tonal switch, back to vital stats: “I began writing in 1879.” That year, at age nineteen, he became the principal economic support for his family. There’s self-deprecation – “I have sinned in the dramatic line too, though with moderation” – and silliness: “I have been translated into all the languages with the exception of the foreign ones.” He writes: “I practice medicine, and so much so that sometimes in the summer I perform post-mortems, though I have not done so for two or three years. Of authors my favorite is Tolstoy, of doctors Zaharin." [Who can identify Zaharin? He’s not mentioned in Rayfield’s biography.]</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In my job, I’m more accustomed to reading self-penned biographies that amount to lengthy lists of grants and awards. In his twelve remaining years, Chekhov turned himself into a genius.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02823306439550418028noreply@blogger.com1